Why I Went MIA in Q1 and the Joy of Missing Out (on Social Media)
You may wonder why I went MIA in Q1…
I still wrote a post for you, because the penguin situation annoyed me, but I went pretty much cold turkey on Facebook, Instagram and X (I was not really using TikTok, or anything else anyway).
Effortless Quitting
First of all, it was much easier than I thought and maybe — just maybe — because I did not force it.
I was getting more and more fed up with social media this past year, to the point where I went down to following 40 friends on IG, and… I didn’t see the point of still using the platform.
Yes, I have missed a few opportunities to share my thoughts (here comes the blog though!), probably missed a couple of events from my friends’ lives, and they definitely missed out on seeing parts of my — extremely entertaining — life, but… I didn’t even think about it that much, and I definitely did not regret it at any point.
Treat Social Media Like a Chocolate Bar
See, I think the beauty happens when you’re tired of things that are net-negative to you.
I had a big sweet tooth in the past, tried to cut out sugar a couple of times — succeeded for the period I promised myself (30 and 90 days), but then got back to it.
But when the thought crossed my mind: “what’s the point of sweets?”, it all changed. I started enjoying fruits more, fell in love with dates and never really looked back. Yeah, I will have some ice cream or a cookie every once in a while, but it’s not something that is on my mind anymore, and I will not go through the entire chocolate bar in one sitting.
The same thing happened to me with social media. Got tired, deactivated, have not looked back. I have activated it again now, but to be honest — it all seems extremely boring. My screen time went from God-knows-how-long to a few minutes a day. I’m happier. Life’s better. There’s no FOMO. I don’t need to know about yet another celebrity scandal, or AI tool.
My only recommendation is: JUST DO IT. You can call it a dopamine detox (another buzzword, bleh), or whatever suits your agenda, but just do it. I personally think the more importance you put on it, the less likely you are to succeed, so I wouldn’t really use any specific titles there.
Stanford Paid People to Quit. I Did It for Free
And if you don’t trust me… Well, well, well… I found a study where Stanford paid 35,000 people to deactivate Instagram and Facebook for six weeks.
The metrics are self-reported, but the scale is hard to ignore, and the results were very positive: depression went down, anxiety went down, overall happiness went up.
For those looking for exact numbers: they noticed a 0.060 standard deviation improvement in the Emotional State Index in the group that deactivated social media for six weeks, compared to a group that deactivated just for one week.
Interestingly, it had the highest effect on women under 25.
I do have a little problem with this study, as it was done before the 2020 US Election, but it suits my agenda and my own findings, so I accept it.
Here’s the source: https://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/emotional_state.pdf
The feed will always be there. The question is whether you will.
Thanks & keep winning,
Raf